The present invention relates to an automatic accompaniment apparatus for playing chords, designated by a chord designation means such as a keyboard, based on a chord performance pattern stored in a memory, and more particularly it relates to an automatic accompaniment apparatus which appropriately changes intervals of chords to achieve a varied accompaniment performance.
There has heretofore been known an automatic accompaniment apparatus of an electronic musical instrument, which designates a chord upon depression of keys on a keyboard and automatically generates tones of the designated a chord in accordance with a predetermined chord performance pattern to make an accompaniment performance, and sequentially generates bass tones having pitches determined based on the designated chord and tone generation timings to make a walking bass performance (e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open (Kokai) No. 59-140495).
In the conventional automatic accompaniment apparatus, generation of bass tones is controlled by note information and timing information, and that of a designated chord is controlled by only the timing information.
For this reason, in the conventional automatic accompaniment, identical chord tones are merely generated at identical pitches and at a predetermined rhythm, resulting in poor variation.
In order to vary the performance, note information (pitch information) may be stored like the bass tones. In this case, the volume of chord pattern information is undesirably increased. In particular, if polyphonic tones are stored, a capacity required for a chord pattern memory is increased.